Right now, the record suggests, every vote counts in battleground Pennsylvania.

Candidates crisscross the state to drive the turnout in their respective party bases. Both sides compete like mad for visibility, momentum and eventual voter dominance in the swing areas. The results depend, from year to year, on how those puzzle pieces fit together.

One year, it’s Democrat Barack Obama on top by 10 percentage points. Two years later it’s Republican Tom Corbett by 9 percentage points in his gubernatorial race.

Dominic Pileggi is the Republican Senate Majority leader

It’s a statewide political puzzle that Carlisle resident David Bateman has come to appreciate after living in less electorally competitive Kansas. There, Bateman, a registered Democrat, remembers casting his vote for president with a mixture of duty and frustration because his party was rarely competitive in a national election.

“When I lived in Kansas, we never got any attention whatsoever in the presidential race ... and I felt like, ‘Why the heck do I even vote?’” the Shippensburg University professor said.

Now Bateman, who is a part of the state’s 19th Congressional District here, wonders if a proposal to allocate Pennsylvania’s 20 presidential electoral votes in 2012 by to popular vote totals in each district could effectively put him back in Kansas again.

Supporters like state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi and Corbett have said they believe such a system would more fairly reflect the political diversity of the state and allow majorities in a variety of regions across the state to be heard.

But it has its own set of consequences.

The 19th district, comprised of York and Adams counties and the eastern half of Cumberland County, is one of three in the state that has never had a vote margin of less than 10 percentage points for a Republican presidential candidate going back to 1980.

Three more, anchored in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, have never had a margin of less than 10 percentage points for the Democrat.

That adds up to six districts that are patently noncompetitive, and where many voters — especially those who happen to belong to the minority party in their region — see that the proposed change will essentially leave them in a political dead zone with regard to the national election.

“It would not cause me to stay away from the polls,” Bateman said, “but I would lose any hope of trying to steer the national election ... and I definitely would feel like less of a participant.”

It was a sentiment echoed repeatedly by voters, mostly Democrats, in two of the four midstate districts — the 19th, and the 9th, which covers all or part of 14 counties from Perry and Cumberland in the east to Altoona in the west.

“My vote? Forget it,” said 80-year-old Mary Toretti, a New Cumberland retiree and a Democrat, when asked about the proposed system. “I may as well not even vote.”

Republican Michael Monighan of Lower Allen Twp. said that he is in his comfort zone when it comes to most elections results in Cumberland County, so he’s OK with this idea of localized results. But even he allowed that it could dampen his interest in the race.

“If I’m pretty sure of the outcome, I’m going to be less interested,” Monighan said.

This sense of voter disenfranchisement is one of the biggest problems of the Electoral College change proposal advanced by Pileggi last month, political scientists say,

Under current law, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes are cast for whomever wins the statewide vote count. The candidate with 270 or more electoral votes nationwide is declared the winner of the presidential election.

Attempts to reach Pileggi for this story were unsuccessful.

But last month, the Senate leader told the Internet news service Capitolwire he was offering his plan because it “would more precisely conform the [state’s] Electoral College to the popular vote and it would make the election more relevant across the state, give voters more of a sense that they are active participants.”

Analysts reached for this story disagreed with that latter point.

“In some of those more extreme areas, [a statewide race] is right now the only time their vote really matters that much,” said Jack Treadway, a retired political science professor at Kutztown University who has also authored a history of elections in Pennsylvania.

“Those Republicans in Philadelphia know that they’re not going to elect a mayor or a sheriff or a member of Congress. But they can help to elect a president.”

While there is some belief nationally that Pennsylvania — because of five straight Democratic wins in presidential races — is losing its swing-state status, many in-state political analysts dispute that notion.

The Democratic ticket won three of those five presidential elections nationally, after all, and a fourth — the Bush vs. Gore race of 2000 — was a national popular vote win for the Democrats, too.

In 2008, Pennsylvania was one of the top two or three most-visited states in the country, and everybody mattered. “The candidates went to a variety of places in the state, encouraging aggregate turnout,” Franklin & Marshall College political scientist G. Terry Madonna said. “And that gave every person in the state a reason to vote.”

McCain made a major, albeit losing, bid for Pennsylvania as his campaign sputtered in the late going, seeing it as one of the last of the battleground states that could go his way.

In central Pennsylvania alone, the Republican nominee made two get-out-the vote visits to the Harrisburg area in the last two weeks of the campaign, while dispatching running mate Sarah Palin to Dauphin borough the Friday before the election to take her daughter trick-or-treating.

He also ran more ads in the Harrisburg television market during one stretch in late October than in all but six cities around the country, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project.

Obama, meanwhile, campaigned mostly in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh but spent a lot of money on TV advertising statewide and dispatched top surrogate and former President Bill Clinton to Harrisburg the week before the election.

All that midstate attention might go away under the Pileggi plan, Madonna said, if only because it’s a given who is going to win here, and the quest for supersized margins of victory will no longer really matter. Same with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, if a statewide win now brings just two votes instead of 20.

And in a lot of those places, Madonna added, the risk is that voters will drop away, too, concluding: “’Why vote? Because I know how this is going to go.’”

Supporters of the Pileggi plan suggested last week the disenfranchisement argument is tortured overanalysis.

“I don’t understand how the fact that one party might have a voter registration advantage over the other makes someone’s vote less significant,” said Charlie Gerow, a Harrisburg-based public relations and political consultant who is backing the change.

“We think it’s going to provide for more voter participation and more robust campaigning,” Gerow said.

Even if there were an increase in voter apathy in some places, Gerow added, he would argue that the notion that a majority of voters in each district knows that their votes will count in the final tally is a greater good.

But Kutztown’s Treadway isn’t so sure.

It’s not that a winner-take-all system of awarding the state’s electoral college votes is perfect, he said. But he feels that voters should recognize there are consequences of a change.

“That Democrat in York County or that Republican in Pittsburgh has always said: ‘At least in the presidential election my vote matters.’ And now you’re saying: ‘No, it doesn’t anymore.’” If you believe that participation in a democracy is essential, I don’t know how this does anything but depress that.”

If you go: The state Senate’s State Government Committee will conduct a public hearing on Electoral College reform in Pennsylvania at 11 a.m. Tuesday in Hearing Room 1, North Office Building.

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